Scientists have warned of an increase in the numbers of devastating earthquakes around the world next year.

"The correlation between Earth's rotation and quake activity is strong and suggests there is going to be an increase in numbers of intense earthquakes next year", Bilham told Britain's the Observer. According to experts, the earth's rotation is slowing down, which will cause intense seismic activity, especially in tropical areas which are heavily populated.

A damaged building in Kermanshah, Iran after last week's magnitude 7.3 natural disaster that killed hundreds of people. According to Bilham, between 25 to 30 tremors with 7.0 magnitude or greater occurred in these periods compared to an average of 15 large earthquakes in other years.

Earlier this month, Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado in Boulder and Rebecca Bendick of the University of Montana highlighted the link between the Earth's rotation and its impact on seismic activities.

"The rotation of the Earth does change slightly - by a millisecond a day sometimes - and that can be measured very accurately by atomic clocks", said Bilham.

"The correlation is clear. earth gives us a five-year warning for future earthquakes, "said Bilham and pointed out today that more than four years have passed since the Earth began a new cycle of slowing its rotation".

In the study, the researchers found that the number of seismic activities had drastically increased when Earth's rotation gets slow down. The researchers found that the relation between Earth's rotation and quake activities is very strong, which indicates that the world will witness more intense earthquakes in 2018.

"The inference is clear". There seemed to be visible spikes in seismic activity marked by an increase in the number of a large natural disaster.

The scary reality is that we are at the end of one of the five-year slowdowns.

The link between the Earth's rotation and the number of big earthquakes was unclear, but slight changes in the behaviour of the Earth's core could be causing both effects. So far we have only had about six severe earthquakes. But from 2018 we could easily have 20 years.

In addition, it is hard to predict where these extra earthquakes will occur, although Bilham said they found that most of the intense earthquakes that responded to changes in day length seemed to occur near the equator.